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  A Baron for Becky

  Jude Knight

  Copyright 2015 Judith Anne Knighton writing as Jude Knight

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except for including brief quotations in a review.

  Cover image: Young Woman in a White Hat, 1780, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my husband, with whom I have learned how hard marriage is, and how rewarding.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One 1807

  Part Two 1810

  Part Three 1813

  Epilogue

  News and special offers

  Bluestocking Belles

  Published books

  Coming in 2016

  Farewell to Kindness - excerpt

  Connect with Jude Knight

  Prologue

  In the nursery, the two little girls waited, sombre in their mourning blacks. Hugh, Baron Overton, had not paused in the hall below. He handed his gloves and his tall hat with its crepe band to the nursemaid, barely caring whether she caught them. He had eyes only for the poor, orphaned mites left in his care.

  He knelt, so he didn’t loom over them, and they both shrank a little, clinging to one another. Were they frightened of him? He had never hurt them; in the four years he’d been married to their Mama, he’d barely seen them.

  He could tell himself he’d been busy putting his unexpected inheritance back on a sound financial footing. And it had worked: those long voyages to secure cotton for the mill in Liverpool, trips to London for buyers, constant scurrying to and from the West Indies and the length and breadth of England.

  But the truth was, he’d also been avoiding their Mama. Only after he’d married the widow did she tell him she hated him—only after the birth of her deceased husband’s daughter and her own reluctant consent to take him into her bed. Only then did she tell him that she couldn’t bear the scars on his face and body; that it made her ill to touch him.

  Was it the scars the girls feared? He turned his head a little, so the light fell on the unmarked side of his face. What did one say to little girls of four and seven?

  “Are you well, my dears?”

  The older one stiffened her thin shoulders and stuck out her chin, all determination. “Papa?” she said. “Have you come to send us to the orfasemery, Papa?’

  “I don’t plan to send you anywhere, Sophrania,” he said, “but I don’t understand? What is an orfasemery?”

  She frowned with him, and repeated the words, articulating clearly and slowly. “The orfa semery. Where the orfas live. After their Mama dies.”

  Orphans. He would not have understood, if he’d not been thinking the word himself. Later, he would find out which of the maids had been frightening his daughters with tales of an orphans’ seminary. For now...

  “You live here, my dears, with me. I am your Papa. This is your home. No one will send you away, I promise. You are not orphans. You have a Papa.”

  He settled back, so he was sitting on the floor with the wall as a backrest and his legs outstretched. “Come here, Sophrania. Come here, Emmaline.”

  Cautiously, they approached his welcoming arms, each sitting gingerly upright on a thigh.

  He rested a gentle hand on each small back, and—on a sudden inspiration—began telling them stories about his own time in this very nursery with his three cousins. And, moment by moment, they relaxed, until he had a little girl nestled on each shoulder, prompting a surge of tender protectiveness.

  He had not been a good Papa, but he was all they had. He would have to do better.

  Part One

  1807

  Chapter One

  1807, West Gloucestershire

  Aldridge never did find out how he came to be naked, alone, and sleeping in the small summerhouse in the garden of a country cottage. His last memory of the night before had him twenty miles away, and—although not dressed—in a comfortable bed, and in company.

  The first time he woke, he had no idea how far he’d come, but the moonlight was bright enough to show him half-trellised window openings, and an archway leading down a short flight of steps into a garden. A house loomed a few hundred feet distant, a dark shape against the star-bright sky. But getting up was too much trouble, particularly with a headache that hung inches above him, threatening to split his head if he moved. The cushioned bench on which he lay invited him to shut his eyes and go back to sleep. Time enough to find out where he was in the morning.

  When he woke again, he was facing away from the archway entrance, and someone was behind him. Silence now, but in his memory, the sound of light footsteps shifting the stones on the path outside, followed by twin intakes of breath as the walkers saw him.

  One of them spoke; a woman’s voice, but low—almost husky. “Sarah, go back to the first rosebush and watch the house.”

  “Yes, Mama.” High and light. A child’s voice.

  Aldridge waited until he heard the child dance lightly down the steps and away along the path, then shifted his weight slightly letting his body roll over till he was lying on his back.

  He waited for the exclamation of shock, but none came. Carefully—he wanted to observe her before he let her know he was awake, and anyway, any sudden movement might start up the hammers above his eye sockets—he cracked open his lids, masking his eyes with his lashes.

  He could see more than he expected. The woman was using a shuttered lantern to examine him, starting at his feet. She paused for a long time when she reached his morning salute and it grew even prouder. Then she swept her light up his torso so quickly he barely had time to slam his lids shut before the light reached and lingered over his face.

  She was just a vague shadow behind the light. He held himself still while she completed her examination, which she did with a snort of disgust. Not the reaction to which he was accustomed.

  “Now what do we do?” she muttered. “Perhaps if Sarah and I...? I will have to cover him. What on earth is he doing here? And like that? Not that it matters. Unless he has something to do with Perry? Or the men he said would come?” Incipient panic showed in the rising pitch and volume, until she rebuked herself. “Stop it.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Stay calm. You must think.”

  Aldridge risked opening his eyes a mere slit, and was rewarded by a better look at the woman as she paced up and down the summerhouse, in the light of the lantern she’d placed on one of the window ledges.

  Spectacular. That was the only appropriate word. Hair that looked black in the poor light, but was probably dark brown, porcelain skin currently flushed with agitation, a heart-shaped face and a perfect cupid’s bow of a mouth, the lower lip—which she was currently chewing—larger than the upper.

  The redingote she wore fit closely to a shape of amazing promise, obscured, then disclosed, as the shawl over her shoulders swung with her movements. Even more blood surged to his ever-hopeful member. “Down, boy,” he told it, silently.

  “Mama?” That was the little girl, returning down the path. “Mama, I can hear horses.”

  The woman froze, every line of her screaming alarm.

  Aldridge could hear them too, coming closer through the rustling noises of the night. The quiet clop of walking
horses, the riders exchanging a word or two, then nothing. They must have stopped on the other side of the house.

  “Sarah.” The woman’s voice, pitched to carry only as far as her daughter’s ears, retreated as she crossed the summerhouse. “Sarah, we must go quickly.”

  “But, Mama! The escape baskets!” the girl protested.

  “I dare not wake the man, my love. He might stop us.”

  Aldridge responded to the fear in her voice. “I won’t stop you. I am not a danger to you.” The woman turned to a statue at his voice, her hand on the framework of the arched entrance, as if she would fall without support. He swung himself upright, wincing as the headache closed its vice around his skull. Though he slitted his eyes against the pain, he kept them open just enough.

  “Mama?” The girl’s fearful voice released the woman from her freeze, and she moved to block the child’s sight of him. “Sarah. Watch the house. Do not turn around until I say.”

  Eyes open, he could confirm his initial assessment as she spun to face him. Spectacular. Then she shone the lantern straight on him, and he flinched from the light. “Not in my eyes, please. I have such a head.”

  She made that same disgusted sound again, then stripped the shawl from her shoulders and tossed it to him, taking care to stay out of arms’ reach.

  “Please cover yourself, Sir.”

  Aldridge stood warily, and made a kilt of the shawl—a long rectangle that wrapped his waist several times and covered him from waist to thigh. “I beg your pardon for my attire, Mrs...” he invited.

  But she was ignoring him. While he’d been tucking in the soft wool of the shawl, so it would hold securely, she’d crossed the summerhouse again and lifted the lid of the bench, tipping the cushions onto the floor, pulling various bundles, baskets, and packages from the recess.

  “Mama!” The child sounded panicked. “They are in the house.”

  Aldridge, headache forgotten, moved to a better vantage. Yes. Lights moving through the darkened house. And the men were not bothering to be silent, either, calling to one another as they searched swiftly and methodically: the ground floor, then the next, then the attics.

  A rustle and chink came from the other end of the garden, then an eldritch groan that cut through his head like a knife.

  “The gate!” The woman’s eyes were wide and fearful. Yes, complaining hinges would make that noise, and clearly frightened her more than any unnatural denizen of the night.

  “Sarah, come to me.”

  At the woman’s soft command, the child brushed past Aldridge and rushed right into the woman’s arms, wrapping herself around her mother’s waist. She was a small thing, not quite short enough to fit under the curve of her mother’s breasts. The delicate features, a miniature of her mother’s, showed fear and a quite adult determination. Aldridge had little experience of children but she was much the size of his cousin’s stepdaughter, who was six or seven.

  The woman was holding something against the child’s temple. In a swift movement, he was almost on her, but he held himself apart, afraid of frightening her into pulling the trigger of the small pistol.

  Outside, a rough voice spoke in the kind of argot he’d learned when slumming in St Giles. “Keep by t’prads, I’ll see ’tis all bob. I’ll crash the culls if uns’ve banged that Rose.” “Wait with the horses,” he understood the man to say. “I’ll see that all is well at the house. I’ll kill the men if they’ve raped that Rose.” Heavy footsteps retreating down the path. If they were quiet, they could talk.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, keeping his voice low enough to carry no further than her ears.

  Her whisper was even lower, and he had to strain to hear. “Praying they will pass us by. For the love of all you hold holy, don’t give us away!”

  “You cannot mean to hurt your child.”

  “Better death at my hands than what they have planned for her,” the woman hissed. Her free hand, the one around the girl’s shoulders, returned the frantic hug, patting and soothing even as the other hand held the little pistol firmly in place.

  “Better we all live,” he retorted. “Who are they?” He needed information. Damn his current state of undress. A fat billfold solved most problems.

  “My... Mr Perringworth owes their employer money. He owns... he used to own the cottage. He came down this morning, said he had given them the cottage and everything in it, and it wasn’t enough. He has fled the country. He said...” She fell silent, her face bleak, but the little girl piped up. “They are very bad men, sir. You should hide until they are gone.”

  “Why did you not run with this Perry person? Or after he left?” Aldridge was glad he had been woken by the woman rather than the bullies—the heavies of a criminal loan shark, unless he missed his guess.

  “He locked us up,” the woman said. “We were to be part of the ‘everything’ he gave this man. It has taken us the whole day to break through the wall into the next room.”

  Before she had finished, Aldridge was calculating his next move. The pistol was next to useless. Good enough to execute the child, but against at least four men, maybe more?

  “I don’t suppose you have a sword or another gun in that seat of yours?”

  She shook her head.

  It would have to be his tongue, then. Well, many a woman had called it his finest weapon.

  “Help me drop your bundles out into the garden,” he ordered. “I have a plan.”

  She watched him warily, not moving, as he suited action to words and dropped a covered basket, then a hatbox, then a tied bundle, one from each of the arched sides so they would be hidden in the low shrubbery around the summerhouse.

  “Now, let’s see how much room there is.”

  The space inside the bench seat was big enough for a slender woman and a small child. He began clearing out the clutter that accumulates in such places. The woman suddenly seemed to realise what he intended, and bent to whisper in her daughter’s ear. Together, they silently moved around the small room, collecting the bits and pieces he found and dropping them out into the garden.

  Aldridge put one of the cushions into the space for their heads, and offered his hand to help the woman in. She ignored it, lifting her skirt with her free hand to show one shapely leg, and then the other, as she climbed inside the space and lay down.

  “Here, Sarah,” she whispered. “On top of me.”

  It crossed Aldridge’s mind that he would welcome the self-same invitation. Perhaps the woman might be inclined to reward his act of knight errantry in what he had always suspected was the time-honoured manner. “Focus,” he told himself.

  “Whatever you hear,” he told the woman and child, “don’t make a sound. Trust me. I’ll get you out of this.” He closed the seat lid and retrieved the scattered cushions, then opened the woman’s lantern to blow out the candle, and lay back down.

  Just in time. Multiple boots on the path; voices talking, complaining, or so he understood, that furniture was all well and good, but the real treasure had flown.

  He hoped the child couldn’t understand what they said. He could, all too well, and the woman—Rose? Was that really her name? It seemed too appropriate to be true. Rose was right to be frightened.

  They might get away free and clear, if the thugs believed she was long since gone. One of them suggested the cove had taken the two with him. The cove, this Perringworth, presumably.

  But Aldridge’s momentary hope was immediately dashed. Another laughed. He and his mate had Perringworth safe and sound, his legs broken so he couldn’t run again. And the cull swore he’d left this Rose and her get safely locked up, tied for good measure.

  “Swore afore ya bruk ’is munch bones. Won’t do no yammerin’ now,” grumbled one. A broken jaw? Good to know Perringworth couldn’t deny whatever lies Aldridge spoke.

  The group stopped on the path and argued about what to do next.

  The boss was expecting to sell the woman and her child to recover the money he was
owed, and more. And breaking Perringworth an inch at a time might act as a lesson to others, but it wouldn’t replace the money.

  The London bullies were anxious to get back to the safety of their verminous slums. This wide-open countryside made them nervous. But they were more frightened of their master than the strange environment, and when one of them mentioned a name, Aldridge understood why.

  Smite. Whether the single syllable was a given name, a surname, or a nickname that described the terrible power of his fist, nobody knew. But Smite was the uncrowned king of large swaths of the underbelly of London.

  And, in some sort, Aldridge’s debtor, since the night Aldridge had waded into a fight for the sheer joy of battle, foiling an assassination attempt on Smite by a rival gang. If he could convince these men of his identity, he might pull off the rescue.

  But they’d never believe him if they found him hiding. “Shut your noise,” he shouted. “I’m trying to sleep in here.” Instant silence on the path, then the moonlit entrance was blocked as several large men tried to enter at once.

  “Don’t shine that lantern in my face,” Aldridge ordered, with all the hauteur of his generations of ducal ancestors, and the men—like the curs they were—responded to the voice of command and turned the lantern away. In the returning shadows, six large male shapes loomed over him.

  “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” Aldridge demanded. “Do you know where Perry’s gone?”

  “It be the Merry Marquis,” said one of the men, pushing his way through from the back. Now there was a stroke of luck! Smite had sent one of his chief lieutenants. What did they call the man? Tiny. That was it. A typically laconic comment on his enormous size.

  “Hello, Tiny,” Aldridge said. “You’re a step away from your usual haunts.”

  Big Tiny might be, but he hadn’t come unscathed through a life of violence. His nose had been broken several times, was flattened and twisted towards his right cheek, which bore a livid knife scar from the outer edge of the eye to the corner of his thick, misshapen lips. He’d been beaten around the ears, too, many times, leaving them swollen and deformed.